What is your company’s digital trajectory?

Let us start by mentioning a wave of digital transformations that spans over every corner of the globe. The companies interpret the term ‘digital transformation’ as a combination of ‘cloud migration’ and ‘user experience upgrade’.  They expect to reduce the total cost of ownership of their systems, improve the company’s security and sustainability postures as well as improve user experience.  Even though the intentions are great, that is not necessarily what digital transformation could be.  Digital transformation is a comprehensive process of leveraging digital technologies to fundamentally change how businesses operate and deliver value to their customers.  Keeping this in mind, please consider a couple of points:

A)   Are you sure that removing any paper forms, using mobile technology and including social media into the picture gives you any competitive advantage?  Does it? It is just a new norm, most of it has been known and used for years, and maybe your organization is just trying to catch up and stay in line. 

B)    Will simple lift and shift of your systems to a cloud immediately provide cost saving or performance improvements?  Probably not. More likely, you need to rationalize the portfolio and rewrite and re-integrate many of the systems, which is not a just a cloud migration but sometimes a massive re-do, and the value largely depends on how you do it.

So, what is fundamentally changing for a business when they are doing this transformation?

I want to put this into some perspective. Transition from Road Atlas books to GPS devices completely changed the way we think about road trips. We got access to real-time navigation, dynamic route adjustments, turn-by-turn directions, accuracy, precise location, arrival time, speed information, points of interest, and much more. The opportunities are endless now because business has completely changed. It transitioned from pictures to data and now that data can be used for everything data is good for.  And this is my point: companies are moving in the same direction and reshaping their IT.   However, not too many companies use this opportunity to reshape their Business.  

Take the GPS example. What could a company do to achieve a similar effect?

Let’s look at the business strategy lifecycle - the engine that drives the company forward. It spans several steps, from strategic planning to strategy formulation, execution, and ROI monitoring. In most companies, this process is document centric. Analyses, architecture, designs, assessments, and similar work remain static documents. As a result, typical phase-gate governance processes that rely on these documents are inherently inefficient.

When critical information stays locked in project-specific documents, it creates blind spots, slows or obscures decision-making, and limits reuse and awareness across initiatives. Because these documents often need interpretation, the process also depends heavily on Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), whose judgments can be subjective and prone to error. This dependency is also a well-known business continuity risk.

The situation can be transformed with one critical change i.e., replacing static documents with data available on demand. This shift creates an effect like moving from a road atlas to GPS. It empowers the business with new capabilities: enabling innovation and experimentation, real-time navigation, dynamic route adjustments, turn-by-turn guidance, and more accurate decisions. In short, it may help position the company at the competitive edge - precisely what digital transformation should achieve.

The first meaningful step is to turn those documents into structured, accessible data as a foundation that makes everything else possible. The diagram below illustrates this shift.

The diagram shows how digital transformation begins with a shift from documents to data. This is not about operational processes like claims or payments, but about transforming enterprise architecture-related documentation into structured, accessible data, and measurable data.

This shift marks a fundamental change in strategy lifecycle management, the foundation of all business initiatives. At its core, it advances enterprise maturity through enterprise architecture and addresses persistent challenges such as information starvation and the misalignment of business and IT.

By starting with a focused pilot project, it is possible to avoid large upfront investment and keep risk low. Then, structured data grows - fuelled by continuous contributions from architects across projects - it unlocks insights that drive better decisions, smarter actions, and exponentially improved outcomes for both business processes and the systems that support them.

Ultimately, this transformation delivers the digital capabilities required for advanced decision-making and continuous innovation. In doing so, it delivers holistic improvements and strengthens long-term organizational resilience.